


Parts

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Category: Bride of Re-Animator (1989), Re-Animator (1985)
Genre: AU, Asexuality, Coercion, Dysphoria, M/M, Medical Abuse, Misogyny, Sex Repulsion, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 10:25:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7264135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herbert West always intended his work to transcend the imperfections of the physical body. Including his own.<br/>His interactions with Dan are complicated by that very issue, even as they work to create his masterpiece.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Herbert's experience of dysphoria, combined with his canonical misogyny and the era in which he lives, combine to create an interpretation of the character whose experience of trans-ness coincides closely with the 'Born in the wrong body' narrative. This is specifically a single-character decision, and in no way meant to represent a blanket statement about the many, incredibly varied ways in which being trans manifests in the lives of actual people.

Herbert kept Dan from seeing his scars until the night of the Miskatonic Massacre. It didn't take long for the police to pinpoint the two blood-spattered young men at the center of the chaos, Herbert covered in the slime of Hill's grasping viscera as if he'd been born anew. They were hauled in for questioning, and with that came the demand for a physical exam.

He put his foot down at that. "Absolutely not. We've told you everything we know. This pointless degradation is beyond the pale."

"Herbert," Dan hadn't just sounded exhausted but  empty. They’d had to drag him away from Meg’s still-twitching body.  "Come on. It's probably routine. Then we don't have to come back."

They were all looking at Herbert, and he realized then that incarceration was still a threat. It would stop the work. The only real, important thing. "Is there a private room?"

They took 'private' to mean a shared locker room for him and Dan, and there was no time to corner an officer without being overheard. He crossed his arms over his sticky, hardening coat, unwilling to move.

"Come on. I want to go home." Dan was already down to his underwear.

"Go ahead."

Dan lowered his voice to a hiss. "These are the cops. You want them to look into what we were doing? We have to cooperate. Just take off your shirt!"

Cornered, Herbert felt his heart thudding in his chest. Any explanation would be as damning as the visual evidence.

He dressed as he did for good reason. His clothing was camouflage, armor; a projection of the person he was and should be seen as. He owned three suits, the coat, various ties and shirts and undershirts--all he could afford after disposing of the other wardrobe.

He only wished his Adam's apple bobbed when he brought a hand to his throat and eased down the knot of the tie that hid its absence.

The  mechanical force of his gestures was unnecessary for the task but crucial to hiding the slight tremor in his hands. Off came the tie, the coat, the shoes. He folded his ruined pants, and avoided Dan's eyes as he undid the buttons of his shirt.

The surgeon hadn't been subtle. But he had been cheap and quiet. The raised, visible scar tissue under his nipples had been an acceptable cost, never to be seen.

He'd always sneered at the use of tube socks to create an illusion of supposed manhood. He'd have given all of the money he had left to have a pair now, as Dan squinted in confusion at his flatness, natural and artificial.

He could have removed his glasses to preserve the delusion a little longer; convince himself that Dan wasn't seeing or noticing. Instead he left them on and stared back, drinking in every nuance because knowledge was power.

"Herbert," Dan managed at last, hands going down to brace on the bench he straddled. "Herbert, were you--"

_Don't, don't, don't--_

"Were you in some kind of accident?"

He nearly laughed before answering.

"You could say that. An accident of birth." He didn’t let Dan's confusion blossom into more. He strode past to the door, swallowing his pride long enough to play the poor, shaken victim for the police. He felt Dan's eyes on his shoulders all the while, piecing it together. Bright boy. Miskatonic's most promising. He followed Herbert back to their home as if that night hadn't ruined their lives.

Herbert stole his socks.

~*~

Peru was Hell. The testosterone hidden at the bottom of Herbert's bag ran low quickly, and even his own estimated doses and attempts at synthesis couldn't stop a softening of his features and bare patches where hair should be. Worse, his period began again. He told Dan he’d been stabbed. A fresh crop of wounded arrived before the questions could come. When they returned home again, it was easy to slip into a new house and new jobs and tuck everything away under a file labeled “Over There” and forget it.

For a few months things were perfect, the unearthing of the mausoleum a serendipitous sign for their progress. Dan helped him bring home bodies from the morgue, and they worked side-by-side with shoulders pressed together in the pursuit of eternal glory.

The peace couldn’t last forever. There were too many quiet spaces in the house they rented; progress dried up as their research hit a wall. There were too many moments where Dan approached Herbert awkwardly, swaying from one foot to the other as his mouth worked without sound. Each aborted attempt only made it more clear that the day was coming.

He had to hide his shots, pilfered from the hospital, once Dan insisted on 'helping' him drop his addiction. He felt the curtain wear thin.

Was it any wonder Herbert jumped at the chance to create a distraction, a replacement--a vessel for all Dan's worries and urges?

She had a shape, one he crafted to known standards. She would have  all the typical parts, fully-functional. He could have done differently, but she was for Dan. He loved her too, in his way. The thought of her, not yet born of his fingertips. There was so much to plan. She had to be perfect; for Dan but not just. The flawless child of his intellect; his final triumph over his traitorous body.

Dan still wavered, caught on a moral high ground only he could see. He was becoming like the rest of them: fearful and ossified, standing in the way of progress. Herbert saw the bright, rare open mind that had drawn him in dying out, and he panicked.

~*~

Any elegant plan was cut short by a more practical one when he grew careless. He'd assumed Dan's shift would be longer and, not wanting to leave his reagent as it brewed, he'd taken his injection in his lab. That was where Dan found him, slacks around his knees and the syringe buried in the meat of his thigh.

"What the hell is this?" Dan had already primed himself for righteous indignation. It was his first salvo, in those days.

Herbert ignored him for a few seconds, half-swiveling on the stool and pulling the needle carefully free, capping it, and setting it in a basin for disposal. Safety first. Not avoidance.

Then Dan grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him, shouting something about heroin, morphine, what is it this time--

The shock value of the truth wasn't nearly worth it, though he did take some tiny pleasure in seeing Dan struck momentarily dumb.

"Jesus. Jesus Christ, Her--You're--"

 _“You're_ interrupting a routine dose of medication," Herbert broke in before Dan could earn his hate, tugging his shirt-tail down to cover what was and wasn't there.

"How long..." Dan gestured, trying to make his hands speak for him.

"It was prescribed before we met." As if that were the whole of the ugly query. "That should settle things."

Dan's shock made him easy to steer, like it always had. He had his willing assistant for the night, a second pair of hands to brew the quantities of reagent they would need for their great work. It was their best night since that first in the morgue, as long as Herbert ignored Dan's flitting, nervous looks.

~*~

He paid for it far sooner than he thought he would. Less than a month later, when Dan was walking out the door at six-thirty PM with the smell of cologne at his neck.

"Are you committed to our work or not?" he snapped, tired of preamble that went nowhere.

And Dan, who had always argued and defended himself before, looked down at him now (their heights had always been disparate, but this was the first time...). His eyes were _soft_.  "Herbert...are you jealous?"

For just a second it was the right question, until Herbert's brain fell back into his body.

"No!"

He recoiled, but Dan's hands came up to his shoulders. The familiarity twisted the knife, because Dan should be shaking him; but this was gentle, pulling him in half-against his wishes.

"Let go of me, Dan. This is completely unprofess--"

And then his words were smothered.

Dan's lips were warm, and the shock at the contact that went tingling through him wasn't entirely unpleasant. He felt himself relax into the kiss, just an inch. It was just like Dan to take a mile, wrapping an arm around his hips and pulling him close; sucking at Herbert's bottom lip until it was swollen and flushed. His free hand was stroking Herbert's back, mumbling into his mouth--following a script, as if he was...

"Get off!" He shoved as hard as he could, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What's the matter?" He had the gall to look confused, like a dog slapped for playing too hard.

"I recruited you as my assistant. This is the kind of pointless distraction that's endangering our work."

Dan's lips (wet lips, from kissing Herbert) pressed together, and his jaw jutted out aggressively.

"You 'recruited' me for a reason."

"Yes, because I _thought_ I could trust you to help with my work."

"You trust me with something else, too, though."

Which was so much bullshit. Herbert hadn’t confided, he’d been _caught_ \--though he might have wanted  to, might have wished he could--

And this proved why it was a mistake, because Dan wouldn't do this with any other gay man.

"You're deluding yourself into thinking I'm--" his lip curled over the word, "what you think I am. You're incorrect at a base chemical level. Or are you often in the habit of kissing men?"

"No," Dan said slowly, hands out like Herbert was a spooked horse. "Just you."

It was barely a scrap of an acknowledgement. Not even that. But he wanted to believe it, damn his sentimentality (he shoved the thought down, refusing to let Dan have ammunition for his claims). He set his mind to making use of an asset, like he always had.

"What do you want from me?"

"Me? You're the one who was just--"

"Are you attracted to me?" Simplify; Dan always needed things spelled out. Herbert himself required specifics.

"What? No! I mean." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I mean you're not--bad looking. I guess I never thought about it."

Of course not. He'd thought of Herbert as an equal before; not a weak, fuckable conquest. "But you are now."

Dan looked at his sneakers.

"I can't have you distracted." His fist clenched behind his back so hard that the nails drove into the skin.

"I'm sorry! It's a little--" Dan gestured obnoxiously, as though a simple medical definition was completely beyond his ability to articulate. "It's distracting, okay?"

Anything with a vagina was, it seemed.

"I don't want you distracted by _outsiders_ ." His teeth bared themselves, the reaction animalistic and most certainly _not_ the smile he worked to turn it into.

Being distracted by Herbert was at least something like focus.

Still that lost puppy look. Dan had always taken better to gentle words that hid the firm hand behind them. Herbert wasn't sure he had the patience for it, not with this. He closed the gap between them in lockstep, awkwardly mashing his lips against Dan's. He had to stand on his toes to reach.

"Call that girl and tell her you're cancelling," he said when he stepped away. "We have work to do."

~*~

Herbert had counted on an increase in casual contact; Dan had smothered that damned cat with affection when he had it, and he hadn't been able to have Meg in his sight without holding her.

He'd hoped, foolishly, that Dan would have the sense to treat him differently.

A single kiss was quickly deemed insufficient; Dan would come up behind him and bury his nose in Herbert's neck, pressing himself flush along Herbert's spine. He began pestering Herbert for time outside of the lab: dinner, a movie, "can't we talk about something else besides dead things?" As if that wasn't why this whole arrangement had started.

"Come out with me," he asked again and again and _again_ , until finally Herbert had to snap back.

"Are you blind, or just suicidally stupid, Dan?"

"What?" Poor kicked puppy. Herbert's patience was so very spent, with every opened door, every ‘heavy’ object.

"What exactly do you think would happen to us, out on a--" The word stuck in his throat, because even Dan hadn't said it, but Herbert was the blunt one, after all. "A date."

"I--" Dan blinked, eyes flicking in a disturbing up-and-down assessment that made Herbert want to disappear from view. He crossed his arms over his chest.

"Herbert, _that's_ why you won't?" And the hope dawning in those big brown eyes shouldn't have been so disconcerting. The hand on his cheek shouldn't have made him shake. "You're right, I'm sorry. Just please." Another kiss, tingling and too damn sweet. "Please, let me do something for you."

Herbert didn't want to be done for, save in his lab. But Dan was calmer lately; less angry. And yet humming with tension like  a coiled spring.

"You have a plan." Of course. But little concessions had paid off in the past.

"Let's have a normal night." Dan's thumb brushed across his cheekbone, traced his lower lip. "Let me make you feel good. Just this once."

"Once." To speak he had to part his lips to the touch, taste the tip of Dan's thumb against his tongue. He turned his head to the side, breaking the contact, and could see that he'd failed another one of Dan's unspoken tests. But he'd agreed, and that was apparently enough.

~*~

"Normal" entailed white noise on their television and the two of them side by side on the couch, Dan trying to coax him closer. An expensive rented VCR sat on top of the box, playing some  unintelligible garble about fighter pilots.

"You don't like it."

"No." Dan should know better than to ask him for direct opinions.

"I, um." (Herbert could feel the man next to him squirming.) "I rented something else, if you wanted to try that."

"Is it this insipid?"

Dan's face was red in the dark. "I haven't seen it, actually."

He should have known; should have seen it coming, no pun intended, but he'd never been one for pornography. None of it _fit_.

And when the graphic visuals, the too-red too-wet hairy/smooth surfaces began mashing together onscreen in a mass of so much meat, he began to breathe heavily. He bit his lip, dug his fingers into the cushions of the couch. He closed his eyes, but could still _hear_ the groans and squeaks, the two distinct vocal registers.

And then a hand crept up his comfortably open thigh and pressed against his clit.

(Should've sat like a lady.)

He started to retreat, planning to head for the safety of the kitchen. He hit the corner of the couch instead and Dan followed, cutting off his escape. He could feel the steady probing between his legs working at his nerves as Dan cradled his head with a free hand, pulled him into a kiss that left his lips red (just like that whore on the television, her legs splayed and her eyes empty--)

"Lay down," Dan whispered. "You'll like this." His fingers had undone the top button of Herbert's slacks, reached under his briefs to part the thick curls there.

"Not," he managed, "not like this." _Not like I'm one of them_.

"You wanna slow down?" Dan withdrew his hand. The fingers were wet to the knuckle.

Yes. No. He didn't want to do this at all. His body was responding to the cacophonous din and the friction.

And just at that moment, it was hard to remember just _why_ he needed this man so badly.

He'd remember tomorrow, though, if he lost him. He'd wake up to an emptying house, an emptying life, and a half-finished masterpiece minus her intended match.

On the screen, the woman shrieked like she was being murdered (Herbert knew how that sounded).

And as he hesitated, Dan ground his erection into Herbert's thigh.

"Are you safe?" he whispered into Herbert's ear, and Herbert nearly told the truth before realizing what the question really meant.

The testosterone artificially introduced to his body was unstudied, undiscussed. The data in this circumstance wasn't deemed worth gathering. But he didn't bleed; he knew that, at least. In Switzerland he'd looked into going further, taking advantage of the cultural eugenics that would have solved the problem forever. Dr. Gruber had pulled him back with horror stories of improper conduct, surgical practices more interested in the result than the patient. And in the short term, it wasn't worth the recovery period that would have taken him away from his studies.

He's assumed this scenario was an impossibility. Now he could only fumble for an out.

"One way to be sure." He took Dan's hand and changed its route, letting it slide down the back of his loosened pants. He could bear that. It's what was supposed to be open to them, as men.

"Herbert..." Dan squeezed his ass, but went no further. "You've heard about the--we shouldn't risk it. I don't even have any lube. It's not--" he was hesitating again, but lust had dulled his caution. "It's not what we're built for, right?"

The next words came hot against Herbert's neck, barely audible. "I promised I'd make you feel good."

Herbert needed Dan. He'd humiliated himself this far; if he backed out now he'd have done it for nothing. He swallowed. "Lie down. On the floor."

He pulled off his pants and briefs. The shirt he left on, determined to clutch at what dignity remained to him, and straddled Dan’s body feeling awkward and alien. And committed.

The hymen becomes a negligible consideration by the age of thirty. The pain Herbert felt while lowering himself down was no tearing maidenhead, but rather crushing muscle tension and inadequate internal lubrication (fuck the concerns regarding anal sex; he wished Dan had lube for _this_ ).

His thighs shook; he hated pain. Hated humiliation. Hated the hands plucking at the buttons of his shirt to tweak his nipples and the pointed way they avoided his chest hair.

It was a meaningless gesture anyway--the surgery took what sensation he had there, and the thick scar tissue had done the rest. Dan might as well have been rubbing his elbow.

The pain of penetration began to fade, leaving only an uncomfortable fullness, an awareness of that intrusive hole that he had fought his whole life to eradicate. It might have been made more bearable, but that would have meant allowing Dan's large fingers, his tongue--unacceptable. Herbert already felt as if a scar had been torn open.

Dan held his hips as he began rocking up and down, following (to his shame) the motions on the screen. He could hear Dan groaning, telling him he was good, so good, and tight--

He squeezed his eyes shut, nausea coming over him as he felt that wretched, slickening hole begin to clench without his input, trying to draw that invasion in deeper. Rebelling, always, against him.

It was a relief when Dan came. It meant he could stand up. He refused to clench his muscles (they weren't there, they weren't HIS, that thing wasn't a part of him), and he could feel a steady ooze of semen dripping out of him and onto the carpet. Dan didn’t comment when he left to clean himself up.

He gagged a little in the shower when hot water ran into his mouth. He considered douching on a conceptual level, but retched hard enough at the thought of a secondary violation that even dipping his fingers in to remove the filth proved better.

He wondered whether next time he could get away with offering oral sex instead, because of course Dan hadn't meant it when he said “once.” Dan was a highly sexed man.

Dan hated when he used more than his share of the hot water, but Dan could go fuck himself. At least then they'd be even.

~*~

He bound his chest the next day, aware of the way the long roll of bandages crushed his ribs and not giving a damn. Though the offending tissue was long gone, it took him back to the safety of constriction, the powerful thrill of passing for the first time. It helped him hold together when Dan looked at him, not as a colleague or a friend or an equal but as a collection of holes (he'd deny it; he was a romantic and a liar).

It wasn't once. It was a hand riding up his shirt as he went over his notes and freezing on the edge of the binding, the press of an erection against his backside in a hidden corner of the hospital.

The morning after the fourth time Dan had sex with Herbert, Herbert was in the kitchen pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes (he needed food, now, but he didn't have to enjoy it).

Arms snaked around his waist, bringing warmth and a cloud of Old Spice, and he stiffened involuntarily at the feel of a just-shaved jaw rubbing against his own.

"Let go, Dan," he said, forcing his hands to remain loose on the cereal box and milk carton. "We don't have time for... that." An excuse; a safe, unassailable one, while he still felt a lingering stretch and ache in unthinkable places, detected a _smell_ not his own and probably imaginary.

Dan's soft laugh shook both their bodies.

"Thanks for the compliment, but you kinda wore me out last night, Herbert." As though it had been Herbert’s doing, his wants that put him first atop that organ, and then beneath it when Dan rolled him, pinned him to their carpet, rugburn forming on his ass and fluids leaking everywhere--

"Then what... ?"

"Just wanted to check in." His hair tickled Herbert's ear. "You look... good, this morning."

 _Pretty_. He steeled himself for it.

"Handsome." Something broke inside at the word; Dan continued, oblivious. "Sorry, you probably don't--I'm annoying you. Being 'unprofessional.'"

It was an out. Herbert knew he should take it. The sex was sweaty and uncomfortable, minimally pleasurable on the scattershot occasion it caused a burst of whitehot nerves to shoot through him. But.

Handsome. The first time since Dan's little revelation that he'd acknowledged Herbert's manhood. And without the pressure of intercourse to come, the warmth was...pleasant. It soothed some small knot in his shoulders, in tandem with the musky smell in his nose.

"It's a small distraction," Herbert amended, almost mumbling. He went so far as to turn his face back for a kiss.

If it were this, if it were only this, he could let himself indulge; a softness waiting at the edge of the all consuming singularity of the work.  

But it was never just that. Not for Dan. He wouldn't know how to ask.

"Meet me in the lab tonight. We need to get the circulatory system working."

~*~

It would have been bearable, if it only meant touching Dan. There was an entrancing contentment in that, in mapping the softening plains of the man's skin and cataloguing, scientifically, where he gave. But Dan wanted to touch him, was drawn by some dumb animal instinct to the shape he imagined Herbert should have.

And god, even with the handjobs and the blowjobs Herbert offered, he was _obsessed_ with the cunt. Insisted on touching it, fucking it, as often as possible. He saw himself, Herbert slowly gathered from offhand comments and his taste in porn (a recurrent event, a “boy's night,” usually accompanied by light beer that Herbert overindulged in), as a seducer. Almost sadistic, the pleasure he took in overriding Herbert's refusals--idiotic how he reacted every time the adrenaline sent Herbert's pulse racing or made him emit a humiliating squeal.

A few months in, Herbert purchased lubricant just to see what would happen.

He might as well have arrived home naked, the way Dan reacted. As if this were the sign that he was "warming up," coming around to some unspoken standard that Dan had laid out for them. The fucking; the thing he called a relationship. He poured it on slippery-thick and fucked Herbert while he knelt on the carpet, ass in the air like a dog in heat. Herbert orgasmed that time, the burst of stars perfect for the slimy feeling left behind.

In the basement, he hoarded hands and feet and fingers, unwilling to move without the most perfect of parts for his girl. Dan's.

Dan would leave him alone then; no more nights on the couch waiting to become inured to the wet, slurping sounds and orifices presented pink and gaping to the camera; no more two hour sessions that were beginning to leave heat rashes on his skin.

No more gentle press of lips, or the rare flash of genuine admiration (bonding hormones; it was a cheat, and that didn't stop it from feeling good) when Dan actually listened to him.

~*~

After Herbert stupidly tried to change their interactions to include more in the way of anal sex, Dan took it as a signal to became more... demanding. Questioning, requiring participation instead of just _permission_ to fuck into Herbert's body.

"You like that, don't you?"

"Feels good, right?"

"Don't hold it in. I want to hear you."

"Tell me what you want."

None of it, none of it, _none of it_ \--

"You be in charge tonight, Herbert."

 _How_ , and why, and--he could have just done the easy thing and gotten it over with, and indeed moved to do so. But when he climbed onto Dan's lap on the couch, tipsy, he wobbled, and the arms that caught him were gentle and quick. Dan's laugh was light, despite what he was going to do, and his eyes were friendly.

"Careful; wouldn't want you to fall." And the kiss felt good; the whole moment reminded Herbert that he _had_ fallen, so long ago, and it was only his body and Dan's needs that kept him from plummeting further.

"You're right. Thank you." So he kept his pants on and slid a leg down between Dan's, settled his weight on a muscular thigh. The dry-humping probably seemed childish to Dan, but Herbert felt the swell of blood and the pooling wetness in his briefs and wanted the see what he could do with it.

He ground and rubbed, holding tight to Dan's shoulders. It wasn't--awful. Hands on his waist gave him pause, but they just clung, fingers in his belt loops and pockets, along for the ride as Herbert fucked his sometimes-friend's leg experimentally.

The erection at his hip, the threat, twitched. Who knew how long until it was inside him again. But he didn’t have enough rope to hang himself just yet, and the rarity of this controlled pleasure pulled him to keep going.

The slow, steady build of heat reached a plateau, close but not enough. Herbert had never been one to let something he wanted slip through his grasp. Of his own volition he slipped a hand into the space between his pants and his briefs, almost clawing at that engorged little nub of flesh (but not inside, never inside).

"God, Herbert." Dan's voice cut through his single-minded pursuit, and he stiffened. This was it; this was where Dan would put a stop to it, demanding to take charge.

"You're so fucking hot." He was only _looking_ , his free hand on his swollen cock as if the sight of Herbert's satisfaction was pleasure in itself. His strokes came in tandem with Herbert's thrusting hand, harsh and merciless, wringing rare enjoyment from his failure of a body even as he punished it. The sticky flooding between his thighs, his alone, came just as semen spread thick and hot over Dan's chest.

He let himself be drawn into the mess and kissed, watching in detached fascination as Dan drew Herbert's wet fingers into his mouth and moaned at the taste of them...and went no further. They lay in that almost easy contentment until the alcohol in Herbert's stomach roiled and pitched, and he tore himself free. It was the first time he’d regretted the drinking.

~*~

Herbert was sick on a Monday morning, when he was supposed to be getting ready for his shift. He vomited until he couldn't stand up, and passed out pale and sweating on the floor of the bathroom.

Terror will do that.

He came to some time later, cradled in Dan's arms and Dan's care (condescending, pitying, but he'd take it--even Dan couldn't want to fuck him after he’d regurgitated what felt like three weeks' worth of meals, and yet he was so gently affectionate regardless.)

Herbert cringed from the proffered glass of water and instead took a deep breath, stomach still roiling in disgust.

"Babe, don't worry. I called work and told them we were both sick."

"Don't call me that." He sat up, pressing a hand to his aching gut, and Dan's bigger one joined it.

"Sorry." No fighting, just a soft sheepish smile like he was a nice boy. Like he would listen. "I'll make it up to you by fetching and carrying whatever you need today, deal?"

"Deal," Herbert murmured absently, feeling dizzy and half out of his body. Not bad. "You can start by fetching an e.p.t."

It took a long beat for it to sink in. He heard Dan's breath quickening, like his had, but not from shock. "You sure?"

"That's why I need the test. Are you a doctor or not?" Dan almost dropped him in his hurry, returning out of breath less than twenty minutes later as if he'd run the whole way to the convenience store and back. He was flailing again. "Should I--Do you want me to--"

"Get out."

When Herbert was alone it was safe to let his hands shake. He knew how to administer the test, had given the rundown to dozens of baffled women who hadn't seemed to realize that actions had consequences.

What had he become?

He glared at the stick, at his watch, grinding his teeth as the seconds passed. One blue line.

And then, after a few moments, a second one.

He twisted at the waist to dry heave into the bathtub.

He would need a proper test, of course.

He wondered what the etiquette was for asking one's… Dan… for an under-the-table pelvic exam and termination when it was said doctor's own progeny at issue.

The idea of Dan rooting around there with a curette, scraping free his leavings, was almost soothing in its unpleasantness.

Dan was waiting at the door when he opened it. "What'd it say?"

"Nothing conclusive." He thought about throwing the damning little stick into the toilet when Dan held his hand out, but he gave in.

"Holy shit." Dan's breath rushed out in a whistle.

"I'll get it taken care of." One way or the other. He'd undertaken risks in surgery before.

"What?" A beat, then understanding. "You can't! Herbert, this is our kid."

"It's a collection of cells. I want it out."

"Just… " he could see guilt in Dan's eyes, the final dawning of something like empathy. But not enough. "Just wait a few weeks, alright? See how you feel. When we go to the doctor you can--do whatever you feel is best."

As if some cosmic bolt of female understanding would strike him and change the whole of his perceptions. As if he _could_ go to a doctor. Just like that. As if it wouldn't get out to the entire Arkham medical community, sooner or later.

"I don't _have_ a few weeks, Daniel. I don't menstruate; we have no idea how far along I am. And no idea what my doses would do to a fetus, whether or not it's past the three-month mark."

"Well, obviously you'll need to stop."

Herbert felt his jaw drop, flop open like a pre-rigor corpse's. He must have looked idiotic, as idiotic as he felt in that moment with that man: the man who'd ruined his life.

"Fuck you, Dan."

It was quiet, his voice, and his legs trembled as he continued. "I'm leaving. I'm going. I'm taking her with me, and you can go find some other hole to screw for all I care."

"Herbert, wait. You're-"

"Irrational? Hysterical?" Herbert's mouth twisted into a bitter scowl. "I am not a woman, Dan. I am _nothing_ like them. No matter how you think you can fix me by fucking me often enough."

"I never--" Dan grabbed his shoulders, like that first kiss, and the hell of it was that he was still stronger. No matter the doses and the work hauling bodies. "I thought you wanted me to have your back."

"You've had my back. And my front. You've had everything you could take." He jutted his own jaw and finally, finally shoved back, breaking that grip with the unexpectedness of the movement. "I didn't want to hate you."

"Herbert..." Dan's arms were still open, waiting for the space where he'd been. "I love you."

It should have made him angrier. But he was sick, and scared, and the effort of it sapped the energy from his bones. "That doesn't mean anything to me." Words lied. Words always lied. Actions were all that stayed standing. "I remember Hill had no shortage of comments on how much he 'loved' Meg."

It was low. He wanted Dan to scream, to hit him. To treat him like a man. But he only stared, and at last Herbert pushed past him. He didn't have a way to transport her. In the end all he could take was a bag with a change of clothes and his shots, gathered in a hurry before he had to face another barrage.

~*~

He dreamed that night about a giant cleaver slicing up between his legs and carving him out, clean and efficient. It was the most comforted he'd felt in weeks.

He feared things, when he woke. He feared for her, as he'd never properly done. He'd made her functional, put her together to match what Dan wanted, and look what that made.

Dan knew his secrets, however uninterested he was in seeing them develop. Dan could mix a fair version of his reagent, had the iguanas and the pumps set up already. The injection itself only took one to administer.

_(Irony, irony, irony, mirror mirror on the wall.)_

Dan could take her so easily--hadn't that been Herbert's plan all along? This act of creation was in the manner of a gift, born as the woman he couldn't replace or be, long before Dan took it into his mind to fit square peg to round hole.

Fear, the fear that had stayed with him since Hill had stolen his work, told him to rush back. The tumorous little growth in his gut refused to let him. He wanted it out. He couldn't face Dan until it was out.

There were few doctors who would even consider the subject of an elective hysterectomy in conjunction with an abortion, and fewer yet who could be trusted to silence. Hacks, who would leave a gash as long as his arm over his stomach. That suited him fine. They could take it all. All, and more besides.

(A tubal ligation would be safer, would preserve the hormonal balance, might even be reversible--obviously inappropriate.)

They had him sign waivers, like a court of law would do anything but throw the case out immediately. He laughed as he scribbled his signature, contemptuous and beyond standards.

And then the rabbit didn't die, to use the vernacular.

The nausea and the cold sweats vanished the same day the back-alley surgeon told him, all sneer, that there was nothing in there that shouldn't be (overlooking the obvious presence of a uterus).

He swallowed and asked for a more thorough internal exam.

They threw him out, calling him a dyke for his troubles.

~*~

That left him with no excuses, hands gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. He had a pistol under the passenger seat in his car, there for emergencies when a shovel wasn't on hand; never mind that it was Dan, that he couldn't shoot Dan (if pressed, he wouldn't have been able to say why). He took it with him into the house.

He tensed for a confrontation in the hallway, in the kitchen; but there was  nothing. The upper floor was deserted. He wondered if he'd misjudged. Maybe Dan was at work, playing savior as he'd longed to do since before they met.

But no. Dan was in the basement. Dan was contemplating Herbert's creation, as if holding vigil.

He looked… he looked _sad_ , moping there alone as Herbert crept soft-shoed through the cellar door.

He looked like the man Herbert had known, before his body came between them. Soft and tired and harmless. Caring. (If Herbert could have had those aspects of Dan _and_ been treated like himself, it would have been perfect.)

But she was vulnerable, tied down to that table, and  so he strode forward with the confidence he'd been feigning since the Massacre.

"Get away from her," he barked in his lowest, most authoritarian voice.

"You're home." Dan looked as if he might melt. "I know--look, I know I did it all wrong, I just--"

"Get. Back," he ground out.

Dan seemed to notice the gun for the first time.

"Okay." Dan held his hands up, took a few steps away from the table. The picture perfect image of Miskatonic General's meager crisis management. "I know you won't shoot."

It would've been worth pulling the trigger to prove him wrong.

"There's too much in here that's combustible. It might hurt her,” Dan continued. Bright boy; he always had been. They were at a standoff, one on either side of the slab. "Can we talk?"

"No. I'm going to barricade you in the back room. And then I'm going to take my work and leave. Don't!" He re-aimed the gun as Dan started to step forward.

"I shouldn't have--I know." He didn't. Not the half of it. "Listen, there's a clinic a few hours from here. I recommend it to patients. We can go; I'll sit with you."

If Herbert kept laughing out of the blue like this, people would say he was mad.

"What's so funny?"

"I had the flu, Dan." All it had taken was a three-day bug and a false positive to reveal the ugly truths he'd been ignoring.

"So you're not...?"

"Sorry to disappoint." He grimaced and shuffled closer to his goal. She'd have a traumatic birth, brought to life without a home or a real parent or even a name, but that was fine.

Names were so often wrong.

"Don't _say_ that, Herbert!" Dan stepped forward--stupid, so stupid--and Herbert let off a shot into the mausoleum wall. Something beyond it rumbled.

This house was precarious, dug out from underneath to house the dead for years before they had settled there. Perhaps at last it would decide to swallow them.

 _"Don't_ ," he enunciated in turn, "test me."

"I meant what I said." Without the power to touch, to shape and command his listener, Dan looked helpless.

"I'm aware. You'd have thrown my bottles out at the first chance if I didn't keep them hidden. As if it were no more than another fixation."

"No!" He put his face in his hands. "I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to love someone like you."

"You won't need to worry about it anymore. Move."

"I want to!"

 _"IT'S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT!"_ And the shout felt good, _so good_ as it ripped free, even though his voice cracked and a strange thudding sound came from the wall.

Dan stared.

"You got what you wanted." He lowered the gun, just a bit. "You got it whenever you wanted."

"I wanted _you_ , Herbert. All of you. I was trying to--be normal about it."

"'Normal,'" he sneered. "Your precious normality. You've turned out just like the rest of them. Did you think I'd like it, if you treated me like her? You could buy me dresses, and I'd forget about my 'morbid doodles?'" It still hurt, that disgusted dismissal.

"I thought..." so low he could barely be heard. "I thought maybe you felt like you had to do that. So people would take you seriously. I just wanted you to feel--"

"Normal." He could've killed Dan right then, not with the gun but with his hands. "Every minute of my life has been a fight against the pathetic failings you want me to give in to. I made myself everything I am, and you will _not_ take it from me."

"I wasn't taking anything! I wanted you to feel _good_!" Dan burst out. "You never--you're always so unhappy, and I wanted to make you feel like--"

"A woman?" Herbert curled his lip, because the Hell of it was that Dan _had_ \--had made him feel like an object or a tool, any one of the womanlike shapes he used to get off and never ever listened to. "You magnanimously fucked it to make me feel _better_.*

Dan's face crumpled into an expression Herbert vaguely recognized, though the context made no sense. Dan hadn't cried since shortly after the first incident.

"Why do you keep saying it like that?"

He didn't deserve pity. He hadn't earned it. And even if he had, he was looking to the wrong man. "You'll have to be more specific."

"'It,'" Dan mimed scare quotes. "You keep calling what we were doing fucking. That's--you're not the kind of person who talks like that because you can't think of a better word. You're smarter than that."

"And?" Let him have more rope to hang himself with.

"You make it sound like something disgusting. Even your decaying leftovers get better."

"It _is_ ," he bit off the word that followed, "disgusting. To be reminded of that growth I can't be rid of. To know you were going to leave before you found out I met the acceptable parameters to be one of your conquests."

"I wasn't going to--" Dan's  eyes did overflow then.

"Liar. You _told_ me." (Like a breakup in and of itself, Dan's behavior then, but of course Dan never did the leaving in romantic scenarios.) "I have to admit, I'd thought she would be the thing to keep you around, but we use what we have, hmm?" Herbert had always hated a whore.

Takes one to know one.

"If there's a way to keep _you_ here, I'll do it." This reversal, this inversion of all their norms--Dan wasn’t aggressive, at least, even if he was babbling nonsense.

Herbert kept the gun trained on Dan as he approached the table, free hand shaking ever-so-slightly when he pulled back the shroud that covered his beautiful creation. He'd labored for countless hours on every stitch and staple, been exacting down to the last donor. People would look at her and see a new benchmark in what the human race could achieve. Dan would look at her and see the pinnacle of Woman; he'd know, with sudden perfect clarity, that Herbert was something else completely.

But here she lay, half complete. Waiting for him to fix her broken body, and so become one step closer to fixing his own.

"Herbert, you don't even have any way to lift her." Dan was looking at her too; it was almost as if he was compelled whenever her face was bared. That's how Herbert had wanted it, after all. Once.

"I won't have to lift her," he said, almost absently. "She has legs." The legs of a prostitute, used and discarded by her keeper. Interchangeable. Disposable, so long as she and her replacement both had the right pieces.

"You're not going to--" Lightning flashed through the small well-windows; thunder split the air a second later "--she's not ready!"

"Not ready for what, Dan? To live? She has all she needs for that." He could list them all, the components and their sources, if he thought Dan would care. He'd chosen so carefully, while Dan went about his days being normal and his nights-- "Or not ready for you to fuck?"

"What?" His voice was almost lost in the battering roar of rain against the storm windows. "You think I--"

"You chose to stay when I told you I could build Meg again. You were happy to appreciate her breasts, her _perfect frame_. I could have made her anything. Strong enough to lift a car, streamlined and compact. But that's not what you wanted."

"I never said that!"

"You made it clear enough. Every time you brought home pornography of blondes with more tits than brains. Every passing comment on the street. Everywhere you didn't touch when you realized you couldn't 'fix' me."

His voice dropped lower.

"I could have made her a man." (It's not true, of course--not with the heart he put in her bountiful chest, the head above it. He'd have maimed her, in giving the things _he_ needed.)

"Herbert, I wasn't going to--" Dan pulled his hand back from her shoulder like he'd been scorched. Like he'd gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Not after--we're a _couple_!"

"And how long was that going to last? I'll never have tits, Dan. I'll never be beautiful, or… enjoy the things that _they_ would. Someday I won't even have a cunt."

Dan flinched at the word, slung like the curse it was. Good. "Is that what this is about? Herbert, your body is perfect. Don't do something you'll regret."

"My only regret," Herbert growled, "Is wasting thirty years in this useless, unsuitable body." He bristled, slamming his fist down on the slab. "What greater cause could there be than overcoming the failings of the human body? Not just death. Every malady that holds us back. Every disgusting, unwanted vestigial part. Every person will determine what to make of themselves. THAT is what my work will do. And if you won't help me, then you can get out of my way."

"Dammit, Herbert, where is this _coming_ from?" The whining words broke free recklessly, and Dan stepped to the side as though to move around the table, as though bullets would bounce off. "You were happy. _We_ were happy. I was trying!"

"Big of you." Bile rose in Herbert's throat at the memory of their “happiness,” Dan's “trying.” The parts Herbert had enjoyed were only scraps and byproducts; for Dan, the full act would always be the point.

"Just because of one pregnancy scare!"

He brought the gun up and then overhead, firing off a shot into the roof. Dust and chips of plaster fell into his hair; his ears were ringing. " _This_ has been every day of my life since I was eleven. This conviction you find inconvenient during those frantic, pathetic thrusts; that you stop thinking of the minute you've marked your supposed territory. I will not live my life being thought of as less because you have a preference of holes."

"You're a genius! You can't possibly--"

"How often have you reached for something to hand it to me? Asked if I was 'certain' about my own theories? Or, remind me: how often did you stop our work to fuck me when you thought I was a 'real' man? I'd be fascinated to hear it." He stalked closer, less than half an inch and the gun standing between them. "Tell me how much it would upset you, had I declared my intent to use my skills to install more 'womanly' attributes."

Dan's mouth, that mouth that gave soft kisses and hard, painful words, worked in silence for a moment; thinking about his response. How novel.

Perhaps the threat of the pistol was at last working.

Finally he closed, then opened, his eyes, his big soft eyes full entirely of his _own_ pain.

"I don't want you to... need that. Whichever way. I wish you could _like_ your body. _I_ like it--" Herbert curled his lip, and Dan threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Not just… that. I like your face, and your arms, and your..." his cheeks went pink. "Y-your ass."

A slight smile, like he knew a secret. "I just--you're handsome, Herbert. You're so smart, and you don't like yourself."

"This isn't my _self_.” This ugly, twisted shape, this cosmic mismatch. "Your girlfriend doesn't exist."

"What about my boyfriend?"

Dan's moments of clarity never failed to pull the rug out from under his feet. They came so close, only to close around the air next to the intended point. "So you can at least grasp simple concepts." But he lowered the gun to his side. "But I don't give points for half-answers."

"Isn't that--I know you're you. Isn't that enough?"

"Your acknowledgement is," like water, like air, the prospect of finally being seen, "acceptable. But you always miss the bigger picture. I'm not content to live with a defective model. Not when I can make my ideal. Your opinion on the matter is irrelevant."

"What do you want me to say, then?"

"Nothing." Irritation flared anew. "If you can't even grasp the subject of bodily autonomy, you're not fit to be my assistant."

"Why was I 'fit' before I knew, huh? When were you going to tell me?" Dan leaned in, but didn't touch, and the _lack_ stung. "Were you just going to come in one day and demand I do a procedure like that, with no practice, no background, _nothing_ to keep you safe? You have scars already, and you’d never tell me if I hurt you!"

Dan’s rising voice and looming physicality felt like a threat, and Herbert felt himself shutting down, going passive like he'd learned to do so long ago. The reed bends where the oak breaks, and he'd needed to be a reed on occasion. Weak, terrible habit for a grown man, but one he'd yet to train himself out of.

"Jesus Christ, Herbert, why is it so much worse for me to love you?"

He'd been 'loved' before by people with opinions on this subject, and the surgical removal of them from his life had been well worth it. Hans had been the only one to see him without questions or demands.

Or desire.

"You hurt me." It was true, and wrong; shouldn't be said. Not out loud. His voice shook when he continued. "You--I can't--" he wrapped his arms about himself, hiding behind them as he'd done when things began to change, when he'd realized what people were looking at and how it didn't match _him_ . "I don't _like_ sex. I don’t--want it."

And there it was. Reason enough for Dan to leave, when Herbert had been trying to keep the upper hand for himself.

Dan's face wasn't what he'd expected - or it was, perhaps. Horror. But not at Herbert for being so aberrant (at last). "Why didn't you say something?" he whispered.

"You would have left!" It sounded insane this far down the road, when he was ready to chase Dan out. "I couldn't finish her alone. I couldn't finish the work alone." More, he hadn't wanted to. "It was the only thing you responded to."

_Wiles._

"But I--I wanted to finally do something for you,” Dan stammered, voice inching up in distress. “That wasn't a _line."_

"Of course not. But you can't conceive of a relationship without sex. It makes you easy to predict." Wound him. It was easier than swallowing his earnestly meant poison.

"That first time...you seemed okay with it then."

"What." It came  out flat. There wasn’t even a starting point to begin unpacking that. The _first_ \--so the other times, Dan _had_ sensed a wrongness? _Hadn’t_ sensed it then, when the film made Herbert ill with dread and disgust?

Was he ignorant, or only lying to himself?

"I--I tried to treat it like a guy thing, the way it happens." Whatever that meant. "You liked that. You were--you got--" Dan waved a hand below his own waist. "You looked so hot for it."

Herbert coiled back into himself at the reminder, face twisting without his control (how could the memory be worse than the moment?), and Dan _flinched_. "I did it wrong. I know. But I thought...I thought I could make it better."

"You couldn't have asked _how,_ I suppose."

"You never wanted to talk about it! But you'd let me kiss you..." He put out a hand that stopped like a mime’s hitting the invisible wall. “You really don’t enjoy it?"

"Did you enjoy being stabbed?"

"So I..." Dan's hands were centimeters away, restraining themselves but only just. "It was all bad? I hurt you, every time?" Herbert squeezed his eyes shut then, because of course it was less simple than that pat truth. He'd come now and then, when they’d done it properly as men, when Dan had allowed him to set the terms. And the closeness--the kissing, holding, the gentler behavior--all would have been welcome if not for the expectation lurking beneath.

That was what made it so painful; the revulsion poisoned everything he'd expect to gain in compensation, making it all uniformly terrible.

"I lived 30 years without it. I would be happy never to experience it again." It had risen, rarely, above the level of tolerable, a distinction all but erased by how often it was unbearable.

"You should've told me. If I knew, I'd have never, I," he swallowed. "I'm sorry."

Dan always meant so well. It never stopped him from devastating those in his path.

"It's done." In more ways than once.

"So, then," he didn't meet Herbert's eyes; moved at last, it seemed, by some slip of self awareness. "You only did it so I'd stay. You never thought of me as, um," another swallow, thicker this time, "as anything but an assistant."

“I--" He'd felt something pooling in his gut, when Dan held him or spoke to him. Not a desire for--that, but dangerously near pleasure nonetheless. "I did it so you'd stay." He licked his lips. "I--wouldn't do that for someone who was _just_ an assistant."

He'd miss that closeness.

"Please, Dan. I'll leave you alone. Just let me have her." Begging, finally, for what mattered: his beautiful, unfinished daughter, not of his womb but of his brain and hands. Like Mary Shelley’s brainchild, or Athena, fully-formed.

He'd ask her if she liked those names, when she could speak and think.

"I don't want to keep her from you." That touch came down at last, a featherlight brush of fingers on Herbert's shoulders. "And I don't want you to go. If you want to stay," Dan stumbled back on his words quickly.

"If I stay, things will be the same." Herbert often found people alien, but he knew Dan. Knew Dan's patterns. "Not at first. But when my reticence frustrates you. When you miss the sex. You'll wear me down or threaten to leave." And Herbert would let him win, with time.

He was so weak to this man.

"No, no chance." Shaking his head with such certainty, the way he plunged into everything. He turned his eyes away at last, looking instead at her. "I love her too, you know. I want to see her wake up."

"She isn't _for_ you." Not now. Herbert would give her more than that.

"I know that!" Dan snapped. "Christ, I'm not _that_ much of a monster, at least. I just want to be there. I want to know she's alright. I don't want to leave it unfinished like this."

Well. How was that for irony.

Herbert wanted to believe it. Wanted to return to the instincts he'd had at the start, when he'd looked at Dan and seen someone open and bright and trustworthy. It was _so_ stupid to soften to Dan's hasty promises. And yet--the warmth and the pain in those brown eyes were nothing he'd ever seen before, in his cataloguing of every desperately-needed nuance. Torn and compassionate and guilty, but not _pitying_.

Dan stood close enough for Herbert to feel his heat, not quite touching. Fluidly avoiding touch, even, with the skill of a surgical nurse as Herbert bought himself time by sweeping her hair back from her face.

The Work came first, always. The bedrock of it all. He did not answer Dan, but turned nonetheless to fill his syringe with reagent (new, fresh--Dan had been keeping up with the schedule in Herbert's absence.)

The glow of the syringe cast a sickly pallor on her face as he leaned over her. There was only this one chance. The wrong dosage, the wrong application, and he would be back in Dr. Gruber's office, wasting a dear sacrifice. The needle trembled ever so slightly.

Warmth gripped his shoulder, steadying him: Dan. But he wasn't looking at Herbert. His eyes were filled with the sight of her. They were momentarily unified, not in inferior sexual congress but a likeness of purpose; a singular devotion to the child of their minds and hands.

Dan held her arm, steadied Herbert's aim as he drove the reagent into her heart. They held their breath together as the organ lay still for seconds, then minutes. Dan's grip held Herbert to the earth, and then only barely, gentling impossibly as they saw his ambitions starting to crumble.

And then.

A thud, like a fist against a coffin lid.

Another. Then another, slow but strong as that once-dead heart began to move.

With the return of cardiac activity, the reagent was pushed through the vascular system, perfusing through the body that with each beat became less a corpse. When her chest rose with a slow inhale and her large eyes opened, Herbert was sure he saw a mind as well, there behind the animal fear and confusion.

She used her first breath for a scream.

Dan's instinct was to put his hands on her shoulders, to soothe and quiet her. But Herbert relished the noise. It meant she would be strong. The world wouldn't be allowed to forget her existence.  

"She's perfect," Dan breathed.

That, at least, they could agree on.

She focused on Dan's face, his voice, so calming--Herbert couldn't blame her, even as he tensed at the sight. She _would_ be captivated, just as much as her creator and antecedents had, and hadn't he ensured the feeling would be mutual?

Hadn't he doomed her?

But birth was traumatic, and Dan could make this one less so. Herbert had been born a pragmatist, if nothing else.

Her head whipped around like that of a predator when Herbert moved to step back; good instincts.

"No, no, honey, don't be afraid--this is Herbert." Dan assisted her to sit up fully, presenting her almost. "He made you. He's your father.”

Her lips, too full and womanly  for her scant minutes of life, wrapped silently around the word. She looked from one to the other, comprehension already quickening as the seconds ticked by. "Y..." was all she could manage, her vocal chords new.

"Don't be absurd, Dan,” Herbert said, voice soaked in irony. “We both know that it takes two to tango."

Dan’s eyes widened, his face transformed with something like wonder at the opportunity foolishly offered--but after all, he’d done half of it, and Herbert wouldn’t have him _shirk_.

"We're going to keep you safe." Dan turned his attention back to her, tears shining yet again.

"Nothing is safe," Herbert corrected. Best she knew that now. "But you'll be strong."

"We're your family."

What a thing to say, in this antiseptic antithesis of the vaunted nuclear unit. But the way Dan said it… the way he seemed, against it all, to mean it… Herbert found he rather  liked the idea.

And when their hands, warm and cold and both so terrifically strong, reached out as one to pull him close, he went.


End file.
